Introduction
Welcome to the second edition of Teach Yourself UNIX in 24 Hours! This book has been designed to be helpful for both beginning users and those with previous UNIX experience. This text is helpful as a guide as well as a tutorial. The reader of this book is assumed to be intelligent, but no familiarity with UNIX is expected or required.
Does Each Chapter Take an Hour?
You can learn the concepts in each of the 24 chapters in one hour. If you want to experiment with what you learn in each chapter, you might take longer than an hour. However, all the concepts presented here are straightforward. If you are familiar with Windows applications or the Macintosh, you will be able to progress more quickly through it.
What If I Take Longer Than 24 Hours?
Since the publication of the first edition of this book, we've received a considerable amount of praise and positive feedback, but the one message that has always been a surprise is “I finished your book, but it took me a lot longer than 24 hours.” Now you can read here, direct from the authors: It's okay! Take your time and make sure you try everything as you go along. Learning and remembering is more important than speed. And if you do finish it all in 24 hours, let us know!
How to Use This Book
This book is designed to teach you topics in one-hour sessions. All the books in the Sams Teach Yourself series enable you to start working and become productive with the product as quickly as possible. This book will do that for you!
Each hour, or session, starts with an overview of the topic to inform you about what to expect in each lesson. The overview helps you determine the nature of the lesson and whether the lesson is relevant to your needs.
Main Section
Each lesson has a main section that discusses the lesson topic in a clear, concise manner by breaking the topic down into logical components and explaining each component clearly.
Interspersed in each lesson are special elements, called Just a Minutes, Time Savers, and Cautions, that provide additional information.
 | Just a Minutes are designed to clarify the concept that is being discussed. They elaborate on the subject, and if you are comfortable with your understanding of the subject, you can bypass them without danger. |
 | Time Savers inform you of tricks or elements that are easily missed by most computer users. You can skip them, but often Time Savers show you an easier way to do a task. |
 | A Caution deserves at least as much attention as a Time Saver because Cautions point out a problematic element of the topic being discussed. Ignoring the information contained in the Caution could have adverse effects on the task at hand. These are the most important special elements in this book. |
Tasks
This book offers another special element called a Task. These step-by-step exercises are designed to quickly walk you through the most important skills you can learn in UNIX. Each Task has three parts: Description, Action, and Summary.
Workshops
The Workshop section at the end of each lesson provides Key Terms and Exercises that reinforce concepts you learned in the lesson and help you apply them in new situations. You can skip this section, but we recommend that you go through the exercises to see how the concepts can be applied to other common tasks. The Key Terms also are compiled in one alphabetized list in the Glossary at the end of the book.